Isaac Schapera
Chicago – Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, John L. Comaroff discusses his hope for a renewed public discourse in an Obama administration with Chris Lydon on Radio Open Source. The discussion took place in The Watson Institute’s Jukowsky Forum on Friday the 7th, 2008. The radio show is titled ‘The Pariah-to-Messiah-Moment: John […]
Between 1976 and 2010, Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other […]
In this video Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff discussed their book Theory from the South, touching on some of their life long themes. The post 2008 economic crash caused Northern states to experience racial tension, political corruption and the kinds of ailments associated with the “global South”. The couple draw on their long experience of […]
Thoughts on Theorizing from the South: An Interview with John Comaroff, conducted by Lisandro Claudio. Published in Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South, 3(1):3-18, 2015. Also published in The Johannesburg Salon, 10:30-38; http://jwtc.org.za/volume_10/lisandro _claudio.htm. The following interview with John Comaroff (JC), conducted by Social Transformations editor Lisandro Claudio (LC), took place in Copenhagen in […]
Chicago – John Comaroff joined scholars Achille Mbembe, Ho-fung Hung, and Claudio Lumnitz in 2015 for a forum sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Comaroff focused on the 2008 economic crisis and its impact on the global south. Unlike the United States, which saw the stock market crash and housing foreclosures escalate, capital […]
Cambridge – John Comaroff explains lawfare or how authoritarian regimes around the world weaponize the legal system to de-legitimize their opponents. The term lawfare was used in Brazil by the defense of former President Lula to describe the violations of legal procedures by the Brazilian courts, as he was a victim of a collective act […]
The Legalization of Everyday Life: Reflections on Law/fare, Politics, and the History of the Present. Interview with Andrea Kretschmann, Special edition on “Wissen im Recht,” (eds.) Andrea Kretschmann, Caroline Voithofer, and Christoph Stoll. Juridikum 2:257- 63, 2018. John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African-American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer […]
New York – In 2018, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff spoke at The New School for Social Research about “Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: the Metaphysics of Global Disorder.” “The Global South” has become a shorthand for the universe of non-European, postcolonial peoples; it is that half of the planet about which, conventionally, the “Global […]